(to have dinner with: let's pretend that Gould is still alive)

Dawkins is a brilliant and entertaining writer and so is Gould in a different way. Dawkins is right of center, Gould left. Both are as vain as peacocks.

Dawkins is insufferably ignorant about religion while Gould is insufferably pedantic about just about everything.

Both are giants in their field with splashy pet ideas, Dawkins his selfish genes, Gould his spandrels. Both have written weighty magnum opuses: Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Both made their mark early, Dawkins with The Selfish Gene (1976); Gould with Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) and both followed that up with many popular successes.

Dawkins...and I'm going to insist on posing the questions...

Dawkins is right of center? About what?

Anyhow, answer is Gould. Huge baseball fan, we'd have more to talk about.

dawkins... although I enjoy his books, hopefully he’d be less condescending in real life.

I've pretty much read all his books, and this statement seems absurd to me.

For example, I bet if asked what should the US do about it's healthcare system, he'd say "nationalize it".

Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and others are on the left in evolutionary biology because they minimize the effect of nature on the behavior of humans while Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker are on the right in emphasizing nature. In other words, Dawkins more strongly supports the ideas and conclusions of evolutionary psychology while Gould supports them less strongly.

I was referring to their relative political positions in evolutionary biology. Sorry I should have made that clear. See my post above.

But this way of viewing things is complete nonsense.

Ok, but you gotta admit this isnt exactly obvious or standard. Not even sure what the point of using terms like "right" and "left" are here, its sort of arbitrary and misleading. It would be like saying that Dr. Johnson at my hospital is on the left and Dr. Marshall is on the right of the whole "should you give pre-operative antibiotics to patients with acute appendicitis" issue.

Hooray, my dreams of becoming a hard-core right-winger have come true!

Why?

Perhaps you should read some of the literature detailing the conflict. A couple of books I've read are Lewontin's It Ain't Necessary So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2000) and Rose's Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (2000). There's also Not in Our Genes (1984) by Rose and Lewontin, which I can't remember whether I read or not.

You might also look at the sad history of Soviet biology under "Lysenkoism." Additionally, there has been the squabble over Wilson's "Sociobiology." It got so bad that that term is virtually never used anymore, having been replace with "evolutionary psychology."

Not really. See my last post.

The right/left distinction in evolutionary biology is highly significant, and in some cases the infighting has been bitter. The tension is between those on the left who want to believe that human behavior is largely the product of the environment and is therefore changeable by education, and those on the right who believe most human behavior tendencies are innate.

Why are those called left and right?

Because...well, you are an intelligent and knowledgeable person judging from your posts, so I am going to let you guess. You should know this.

If you mean the history of right vs. left and why being conservative is called "right" and being liberal is called "left," the main thing to understand is that what is, is usually considered "right." Right handed is "right." For human beings, adapted to their environment, and especially for older people, the status quo is what they learned to adapt to, and so that is "right."

Notice the quotation marks. I am not suggesting that either left or right is correct in any absolute or moral sense. In times of change, or after a long period of stasis, change becomes necessary (all systems eventually break down; those in power eventually become corrupt, or they lose their grip on security, etc.), and so in such times revolutions can occur. At such times the left may become the majority.

One more point, old people tend to be conservative for the reasons stated above and others, but young people tend to be more liberal because usually they don't have as much as the old people in terms of resources and power and so they want some kind of change that will lead to their acquiring more resources and more power.

BTW you may have read that the left versus right distinction came about during the days of the French Revolution because of the way the opposing fractions were seated in the various assembles. Wikipedia even says that the terms left and right have been used politically since that time. I am not a historian but I would bet that left and right as ways to speak about the politics of change and status quo is far older than that.

No, I have just never heard left and right to mean what you meant them to be so I wasn't sure if it was something related to the political positions or from a different origin all together

lol. wtf is going on in this thread?

OP, what's happened is that you've read some ridiculous nonsense somewhere, and you've formed some ridiculous beliefs that you mistake for "knowledge", and when anyone doesn't share your "knowledge" you label them ignorant. You need to realize that the reason you're getting all these wtf responses itt is that what you think is knowledge isn't.

Let's see. I've referenced Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin, E.O. Wilson, all eminent biologists. I've even named the titles of some of their books. Additionally I've pointed to the famous scandal in Soviet biology brought about by the delusive Trofin Denisovich Lysenko, an important and telling episode in biology. And what you're saying is I've "read some ridiculous nonsense somewhere" which is an entirely vague statement and actually amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem attack without basis.

When people stoop to name-calling it suggests that they have no idea of what they are talking about.

You write: "…and when anyone doesn't share your 'knowledge' you label them ignorant." Prove it. Show us where I've done that.

You're making wild accusations out of nowhere. You need to point exactly to something that is written and address that in some substantive manner.

I think that Dawkins' head would explode if he ever read this. He has pretty strongly condemned Ridley's point of view (pro-sociobiology) in a review of "Nature vs Nurture" aka "The Agile Gene," iirc.

Dawkins even though he isn't in the least bit ignorant about religon.

Apart from a few irrelevent details he is an expert.

Seriously you are completely delusional about this. You haven't provided one scrap of evidence to justify labeling scientific research as left wing or right wing. It's just patently absurd.

I couldn't find Dawkins' full review of Matt Ridley's book, Nature Via Nurture. Perhaps you could provide a link? But Dawkins did say this about the book according to a quote from that review on Amazon: "A real page-turner. What a superb writer he is, and he seems to get better and better." This is not surprising since both Dawkins and science journalist Matt Ridley are on the same side of the nature vs. nurture debate.

Note however that the title of Ridley's book is "Nature Via Nurture," not "Nature vs. Nurture." (And you're right it's the same book as "The Agile Gene.") This is the key distinction: Dawkins and nearly every biologist would say that our behavior is the product of our nature as shaped by our experiences. In fact some genes only get expressed in certain environments.

What I am saying is that there is a divide, a difference of opinion among biologists as to what extent our behavior is the product of our genes and to what extent it is shaped by the environment. No serious biologist comes down exclusively on one side or the other.

To get a feel for the debate, here http://www.racematters.org/naturevsnurturesaynature.htm is a link to an essay by Nicholas Wade.

You're right of course. I was just stirring up some debate. He has learned a lot about religion per force over the years!

To begin with check out the link in my post above. But even better read any one of the books I have referenced and the debate will be obvious. Or simply read Wikipedia about Lysenko. That was perhaps the most notorious example of politics dictating biological research.

It's naïve to think that scientific research is not influenced by political bias. Sometimes it is.